> To put some numbers to this theory, I estimate
> 'economic crossover' for general design tasks based
> on when computer power is cheaper than brain power.
> Human brain power is estimated to be equivalent to
> 100 TFlop to 100,000 Tflop. A computer running
> 24x7 and working at 1 human design engineer equivalent
> rate would be worth about $3 million. So my
> estimate is that when you can buy computers for
> $30,000 to $30 per TFlop plus 7 years (to allow
> time to usefully deploy the computers) is the
> expected date for the Singularity. We are 5-20
> years from reaching the cost threshholds, so that
> gives a prediction of 2015 to 2030.

All the hardware and computer speed in the world is insufficient
to solve a problem without a verifiable understanding the problem
itself.

I know we have several competing projects which may lead to the
singularity but when the question "How much would additional
computing power speed up the quest to build an AGI" was put to the SL4
mailing
list the answers that came back were not that much.

I think it is human brain power that will be the limiting factor in
producing the
singularity not machine horsepower. This is why I am pushing to
cultivate a
genius pool to promote it. It is one thing to talk about an AGI and
another thing
To program one.

If it were simply a matter of machine horsepower we could use
distributed computing
to band together enough cpu's to do the trick now!

We have seen large companies with large R&D budgets working at OCR for
several years now and the recognition rate while high in the 98% range
is still far too low for most uses. Furthermore
incremental improvements are becoming more and more difficult. And this
is when the problem is well understood!